By Robert Lane

Chantal Bossé is a presentation professional offering development and training services in the province of Quebec, Canada. She specializes in visually interactive presentation techniques for improved learning and sales results. E-mail contact: cbosse@chabos.ca and Web: www.chabos.ca.

Robert: Customers come to you for help with their presentation materials. What should they know, or do, in advance that will make your job more efficient, saving themselves time and money as a result?

Chantal: Well, it may sound like old-fashioned common sense, but you should have a very clear understanding of your message beforehand—what will be said and how it will be said. In other words, plan your talk. You would be amazed at how many people dump the proverbial ‘shoebox full of content ideas’ on my desk and say, “Here, make it look pretty”. We certainly can help with idea creation and organizational planning from the ground up. However, realize that gaining an understanding of your particular specialty at that level requires extra time; we must thoroughly get inside your brain to grasp relevant issues and see how they fit together. Good planning from your side in advance, on the other hand, can lessen the need for such extensive detail. Ponder the following questions before our first meeting:

If others will be involved in the decision making process, they should review the above questions as well. A team consensus saves time and money on reviews, compared to having us track down and consolidate the perspectives of multiple individuals.

Robert: You made a comment once that when remodeling content you see many of the same improvement issues over and over. What are the most common problems and how can people avoid those situations in the first place?

Chantal: Remodeling a presentation often does bring extra challenges beyond starting a project from scratch. I’d say my top 5 issues are:

1. Disorganized Message Flow: This topic relates to the planning comments mentioned previously. Most presenters approaching PowerPoint have a tendency to jump right in and start building content on slides without first carefully thinking through how that information will help audiences DO or REMEMBER something. Similarly, little thought goes into how this particular slide show relates their ‘bigger picture’ communication strategies. The result: a poorly crafted presentation that must be torn apart and rebuilt later (perhaps by us), thereby wasting a lot of prior effort.

   

   Before doing anything in PowerPoint, grab paper and pencil and map out your thoughts in outline form. See if the focus, impact, and sequencing of slides make sense on paper first. I realize many speakers skip this step to save time, but proper analysis and planning at the beginning will actually conserve time and money in the long run. That’s the process we go through. Throwing away scribbled ideas on pieces of paper is a lot less painful than tossing unnecessary slides down the road after hours of work.
   
   

2. Slides Full of Text…Those Dreaded Endless Bullet Point Lists! Filling slides with paragraphs of text is just about the worst possible thing you can do to an audience. NOBODY wants to read your text. Nobody can pay attention to a large amount of text on a slide and simultaneously concentrate on what you are saying as a presenter. They simply can’t. Pretending otherwise is an insult to viewers. The first question my team members ask when seeing slides full of bullet points is, “How can you say the same messages visually?”

   

   My advice, then, is to dump almost all your current text and find ways of displaying the same ideas in visual ways, with pictures, graphics, video, animations, charts, and so forth. PowerPoint is ideally suited for highly graphical display. Use its potential. By doing so, you tap deeply and powerfully into the brain’s mechanisms for processing non-verbal information.

3. Very Crowded, Busy Slides. I sometimes think people are afraid PowerPoint will explode if the presentation contains too many slides! Correspondingly they pack displays from top to bottom with more information than a viewer possibly can absorb. Again, such an approach is not good for audiences. Have you ever heard a presenter say, “Uhh, I don’t know if you can see the numbers in this table or not…” My first reaction is, “So…why are you wasting our time showing this material if you already know we probably won’t be able to make sense of it?” Reducing content to one idea per slide, a rule supported by most presentation professionals, greatly improves most performances.

   

   It’s not uncommon for someone to give us a show containing 25 slides, and those 25 slides soon become 60 or 70 after our revisions. Are you thinking, “There’s no way I can get through 70 slides during the amount of time I have to present”? Well, that may mean either of two things. Perhaps you are spending too much time on individual slides. Or, maybe the performance packs in too much information for too short a period of time. In both cases, address the real issues. Don’t assume that cutting the number of slides and piling more information on what’s left will do anyone a favor.

4. “My-Presentation-Needs-to-Be-Printed-As-a-Handout” Problem. If your seminar attendees will be expecting a handout, I strongly encourage you to produce just that: a real handout. Making handouts by printing the slides that will be used during the performance really should be illegal in any civilized society. Presentation materials are a communication tool for the presenter, not an excuse for dumping NOTES on the slide pane so they can be printed as handouts.

5. 

   Make a separate document that contains two or three pages and summarizes the main ideas and facts of your talk. Pretty easy. It’s a good idea also to include screenshots of a few important slides, especially if those displays contain visual content that extends or lends context to the presenter’s verbal descriptions. When you make handouts separate from printed slides, that gives us as designers more freedom to be highly visual with components the audience will see. In that case, your slides don’t have to be crammed full of too much detail and text, just so they can be printed easily. Plus, separate handouts allow more flexible inclusion of media components: audio, video, and meaningful animations.

6. And My Personal Favorite…Inflexible Presentations: When I’m asked to remodel a presentation, I usually receive a purely linear show that allows forward advancement only…slide to slide to slide. I tell the customer in a nice way, “You know, there is a better way of addressing an audience if you want to break out of the typical presentations we see today.” How many times have you been in a performance where the speaker says something to the effect of “I have a slide that answers your question later in the presentation”, or “Remember about 20 slides back when we talked about…”, or “Oops, we’re almost out of time, I’ll just have to show these slides quickly so we can conclude.” During those kinds of performances I’m thinking to myself, “Lady why don’t we just go NOW to that information 20 slides back, or the material 20 slides ahead?”, and “Why didn’t you just skip a few less important slides along the way earlier, instead of now flashing 20 jam-packed books of information at us in the last two minutes?” You can make performances far more conversational and viewer-friendly by adding at least a few basic navigation elements to shows. Then it’s not a big deal at all to move around.

   

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